In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?

For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.

Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

Since the first decade of the 14th Century, Thomas Aquinas’s disciples have struggled to explain and defend his doctrine of analogy. Analogy after Aquinas: Logical Problems, Thomistic Answers relates a history of prominent Medieval and Renaissance Thomists’ efforts to solve three distinct but interrelated problems arising from their reading both of Aquinas’s own texts on analogy, and from John Duns Scotus’s arguments against analogy and in favor of univocity in Metaphysics and Natural Theology. The first of these three problems concerns Aquinas’s at least apparently disparate statements on whether a name is said by analogy through a single concept or through diverse concepts. The second problem concerns the model of analogy suited for predicating names analogously across the categories of being or about God and creatures. Is “being” said analogously about God and creatures, or substance and accidents, on the model of how “healthy” is said of medicine and an animal, or on the model of how “principle” is said of a point and a line? The third problem comes from outside challenges to Aquinas’s thought, in particular Scotus’ claims that univocal names alone can mediate valid demonstrations, and any demonstration that failed to use its mediating terms univocally would fail by the fallacy of equivocation. Analogy after Aquinas makes a unique contribution to the study of philosophical theology in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas by showing the historical and philosophical connection between these three problems, as well as the variety of solutions proposed by leading representatives of this tradition. Thomists considered in the book include: Hervaeus Natalis (1250-1323), Thomas Sutton (1250-1315), John Capreolus (1380-1444), Dominic of Flanders (1425-1479), Paul Soncinas (d. 1494), Thomas dio vio Cajetan (1469-1534), Francis Silvestri of Ferrara (1474-1528), and Chrysostom Javelli (1470-1538).

Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's work: the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit.

Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics.

Philosophy, economics, and decision theory have long been dominated by the idea that rational choice consists of seeking or achieving one’s own greatest good. Beyond Optimizing argues that our ordinary understanding of practical reason is more complex than this, and also that optimizing/maximizing views are inadequately supported by the considerations typically offered in their favor.

Michael Slote challenges the long-dominant conception of individual rationality, which has to a large extent shaped the very way we think about the essential problems and nature of rationality, morality, and the relations between them. He contests the accepted view by appealing to a set of real-life examples, claiming that our intuitive reaction to these examples illustrates a significant and prevalent, if not always dominant, way of thinking. Slote argues that common sense recognizes that one can reach a point where “enough is enough,” be satisfied with what one has, and, hence, rationally decline an optimizing alternative. He suggests that, in the light of common sense, optimizing behavior is often irrational. Thus, Slote is not merely describing an alternative mode of rationality; he is offering a rival theory. And the numerous parallels he points out between this common-sense theory of rationality and common-sense morality are then shown to have important implications for the long-standing disagreement between commonsense morality and utilitarian consequentialism.

Beyond Optimizing is notable for its use of a much richer vocabulary of criticism than optimizing/maximizing models ever call upon. And it further argues that recent empirical investigations of the development of altruism and moral motivation need to be followed up by psychological studies of how moderation, and individual rationality more generally, take shape within developing individuals.

“A history of philosophy in twelve thinkers…The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigor with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented…in a spirit of fun…This bracing and approachable book [shows] that there is life in philosophy yet.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Exceptionally engaging…Geuss has a remarkable knack for putting even familiar thinkers in a new light.”
—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Geuss is something like the consummate teacher, his analyses navigable and crystal, his guidance on point.”
—Doug Phillips, Key Reporter

Raymond Geuss explores the ideas of twelve philosophers who broke dramatically with prevailing wisdom, from Socrates and Plato in the ancient world to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The result is a striking account of some of the most innovative thinkers in Western history and an indirect manifesto for how to pursue philosophy today. Geuss cautions that philosophers’ attempts to break from convention do not necessarily make the world a better place. Montaigne’s ideas may have been benign, but the fate of those of Hobbes, Hegel, and Nietzsche has been more varied. Yet in the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers remind us that we are not fated to live within the systems of thought we inherit.

In the twenty-first century there are two ways to study logic. The more recent approach is symbolic logic. The history of teaching logic since World War II, however, casts doubt on the idea that symbolic logic is best for a first logic course. Logic as a Liberal Art is designed as part of a minority approach, teaching logic in the "verbal" way, in the student's "natural" language, the approach invented by Aristotle. On utilitarian grounds alone, this "verbal" approach is superior for a first course in logic, for the whole range of students. For millennia, this "verbal" approach to logic was taught in conjunction with grammar and rhetoric, christened the trivium. The decline in teaching grammar and rhetoric in American secondary schools has led Dr. Rollen Edward Houser to develop this book. The first part treats grammar, rhetoric, and the essential nature of logic. Those teachers who look down upon rhetoric are free, of course, to skip those lessons. The treatment of logic itself follows Aristotle's division of the three acts of the mind (Prior Analytics 1.1). Formal logic is then taken up in Aristotle's order, with Parts on the logic of Terms, Propositions, and Arguments. The emphasis in Logic as a Liberal Art is on learning logic through doing problems. Consequently, there are more problems in each lesson than would be found, for example, in many textbooks. In addition, a special effort has been made to have easy, medium, and difficult problems in each Problem Set. In this way the problem sets are designed to offer a challenge to all students, from those most in need of a logic course to the very best students.

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices.

At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one's own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are.

Today we associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. So how can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? In this ambitious work, Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an unfortunate obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions, he argues, is misguided.

Ranging across philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger and Gadamer, Sandel demonstrates that we inherit our "prejudice against prejudice" from the Enlightenment. By detaching reason from habit and common opinion, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant invented prejudice--as we understand it today--as an obstacle to freedom and a failure to think for oneself.

The Place of Prejudice presents a powerful challenge to this picture. The attempt to purge understanding of culture and history leads not to truth, Sandel warns, but to shallowness and confusion. A purely detached notion of reason deprives judgment of all perspective, disparages political rhetoric as mere pandering, and denies us the background knowledge we need to interpret literature, law, and the past. In a clear, eloquent voice, Sandel presents instead a compelling case for reasoning within the world.

Practical reasoning is not just a matter of determining how to get what you want, but of working out what to want in the first place. In Practical Induction Elijah Millgram argues that experience plays a central role in this process of deciding what is or is not important or worth pursuing. He takes aim at instrumentalism, a view predominant among philosophers today, which holds that the goals of practical reasoning are basic in the sense that they are given by desires that are not themselves the product of practical reasoning. The view Millgram defends is "practical induction," a method of reasoning from experience similar to theoretical induction.

What are the practical observations that teach us what to want? Millgram suggests they are pleasant and unpleasant experiences on the basis of which we form practical judgments about particular cases. By generalizing from these judgments--that is, by practical induction--we rationally arrive at our views about what matters. Learning new priorities from experience is necessary if we are to function in a world of ever-changing circumstances. And we need to be able to learn both from our own and from others' experience. It is this, Millgram contends, that explains the cognitive importance of both our capacity for pain and pleasure and our capacity for love. Pleasure's role in cognition is not that of a goal but that of a guide. Love's role in cognition derives from its relation to our trusting the testimony of others about what does and does not matter and about what merits our desire.

Itself a pleasure to read, this book is full of inventive arguments and conveys Millgram's bold thesis with elegance and force. It will alter the direction of current debates on practical reasoning.

In this original study, Jonathan Jacobs provides a new account of ethical realism that combines both abstract meta-ethical issues defining the debate on realism and concrete topics in moral psychology. Jacobs argues that practical reasoners can both understand the ethical significance of facts and be motivated to act by that understanding. In that sense, objective considerations are prescriptive. In his discussion of the theory of practical realism, he extends themes and claims originating in Aristotelian ethics while engaging with the most important contemporary literature.

Arguing that desire and reason can agree on what is good, Jacobs explains how good action is naturally pleasing to the agent. In acting well, the agent affirms certain values and enjoys doing so. Jacobs grounds his explanation of ethical value in detailed explorations of the moral psychology of self-love, friendship, and respect. Students and scholars of philosophy will be intrigued by this integrated account of meta-ethics, practical reason, and moral psychology.

"'Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time.' 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes." The quotation from A. Conan Doyle with which this book begins, is a delightfully appropriate summation of the authors' point of view garnered from their fifteen years of experiments on the psychology of reasoning.

Dr. Wason and Dr. Johnson-Laird are intrigued by the extent to which most individuals can be considered naturally rational thinkers. They present here the surprising results of their comprehensive investigations of how humans draw explicit conclusions from evidence. "Given a set of assertions," the authors write, "to what extent can the individual appreciate all that follows from them by virtue of logic alone, and remain unseduced by plausible, but fallacious conclusions? We are not concerned with whether these assertions are true or false, nor with whether the individual holds them among his beliefs, nor with whether they are sane or silly."

At the core of the Psychology of Reasoning is a vigorous discussion that incorporates various illustrations--some of them humorous, all of them fascinating--of the use of reason under a wide variety of different conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on the difficulties involved in dealing with negatively marked information that must be combined and used with other information for reaching conclusions. Thorough treatment is given as well to the search for plausible contexts that will render anomalous or ambiguous statements "sensible."

The authors have strived to isolate the components of inference, the basic steps of any kind of deductive activity, in order to determine the psychological processes involved in them. What has been the outcome of this research? Dr. Wason and Dr. Johnson-Laird conclude, "our research has suggested that the individual's logical competence may be either enhanced or limited by performance variables. And, of these, content has turned out to be vitally important for revealing, or obscuring structure. At best, we can all think like logicians; at worst, logicians all think like us."

Any realist metaphysics must include an integrated account of the transcendentals and the analogy of being, for an adequate metaphysics must be about everything, and all things share in some key metaphysical characteristic—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. However, they do not share in them in exactly the same way. Therefore, there is need to explain the transcendental characteristics in an analogical way. By using the phrase “transcendental analogies,” Reason, Revelation and Metaphysics claims that there are analogies of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, which are related to, but irreducible to, the analogy of being. As this book is a systematic study of the topic, theoretical reason has primacy in the project and metaphysics is given pride of place. But reason is practical and aesthetic as well; that is, our consciences urge us to seek what is good, and we are delighted by what is beautiful. Although goodness and beauty are not reducible to truth, they must be included in any adequate metaphysical account, for metaphysics looks to explain everything. Although metaphysics is traditionally thought to be a philosophical project involving ontology and natural theology, Montague Brown argues that an adequate metaphysics must ultimately be theological, including within its scope the truths of revelation. Philosophical reason’s examination of the transcendental analogies raises questions that it cannot answer. We experience a world of many beings, truths, goods, and beauties. Recognizing that these many instances have something in common, we affirm a transcendent instance of each (traditionally called God). However, although we know that a transcendent instance exists, we do not know its nature: therefore, we cannot say how it is related to the other instances. If we try to apply this transcendent instance as the prime analogate to shed light on the other analogates, we must fail, for the abstractness and universality of the transcendent instance can add nothing to our understanding of the particular instances. Wanting to know how the many exist and are related, philosophical reason finds no way forward and recognizes its need for help. It is the thesis of this book that reason finds this help only in the revelation of the God’s covenantal relation with the world. The first principle of all things—most perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man—is really and freely related to us. Only by accepting this revealed prime analogate can the transcendental analogies bear fruit in our ongoing quest for understanding.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and the founder of pragmatism. Despite his importance in the history of philosophy, a unified statement of his thought has been unavailable. With this publication, readers at long last are offered the philosopher’s only known, complete, and coherent account of his own work. Originally delivered as the Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, Reasoning and the Logic of Things is the most accessible and thorough introduction to Peirce’s mature thought to be found within the compass of a single book.

Beginning with an explanation of the nature of philosophy, Peirce proceeds to illustrate his claim that mathematics provides the foundation of our logic and metaphysics. We find here the clearest formulation of an idea present in Peirce’s thought since the 1860s, the distinction between three kinds of reasoning: induction, deduction, and retroduction. Then follows an introduction to Peirce’s chief logical doctrines, as well as his attempts to provide a classification of the sciences, a theory of categories, and a theory of science. In conclusion, turning from “reasoning” to the “logic of things,” Peirce called for an evolutionary cosmology to explain the reality of laws and described the kinds of reasoning he employed in developing this cosmology.

At the urging of his friend William James, Peirce made an uncharacteristic effort in these lectures to present his ideas in terms intelligible to a general audience—those without advanced training in logic and philosophy. The introductory materials by Kenneth Ketner and Hilary Putman add to the volume’s lucidity. Consequently, this book will be a valuable source for readers outside of the circle of Peirce specialists.

Informed in 1944 that she was “not of the sex” entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School, African American activist Pauli Murray confronted the injustice she called “Jane Crow.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the analogies between sex and race discrimination pioneered by Murray became potent weapons in the battle for women’s rights, as feminists borrowed rhetoric and legal arguments from the civil rights movement. Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race is the first book to explore the development and consequences of this key feminist strategy.

Mayeri uncovers the history of an often misunderstood connection at the heart of American antidiscrimination law. Her study details how a tumultuous political and legal climate transformed the links between race and sex equality, civil rights and feminism. Battles over employment discrimination, school segregation, reproductive freedom, affirmative action, and constitutional change reveal the promise and peril of reasoning from race—and offer a vivid picture of Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others who defined feminists’ agenda.

Looking beneath the surface of Supreme Court opinions to the deliberations of feminist advocates, their opponents, and the legal decision makers who heard—or chose not to hear—their claims, Reasoning from Race showcases previously hidden struggles that continue to shape the scope and meaning of equality under the law.

The turmoil and brutality of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to maintain faith in the ability of reason to fashion a stable and peaceful world. After the ravages of global conflict and a Cold War that divided the world's loyalties, how are we to master our doubts and face the twenty-first century with hope?

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of knowledge. The centuries-old dominance of rationality, a mathematical mode of reasoning modeled on theory and universal certainties, has diminished the value of reasonableness, a system of humane judgments based on personal experience and practice. To this day, academic disciplines such as economics and professions such as law and medicine often value expert knowledge and abstract models above the testimony of diverse cultures and the practical experience of individuals.

Now, at the beginning of a new century, Toulmin sums up a lifetime of distinguished work and issues a powerful call to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness. His vision does not reject the valuable fruits of science and technology, but requires awareness of the human consequences of our discoveries. Toulmin argues for the need to confront the challenge of an uncertain and unpredictable world, not with inflexible ideologies and abstract theories, but by returning to a more humane and compassionate form of reason, one that accepts the diversity and complexity that is human nature as an essential beginning for all intellectual inquiry.

This Sourcebook offers a brief sequence in classical Logic befitting an unspecialized study for students of liberal arts and sciences. The sequence is made up of select texts of the Aristotelian Organon, mostly the opening chapters of each treatise, in the traditional order, where Aristotle lays out the primary elements of reasoning. Study aids accompany these primary texts, providing students with mnemonics and diagrams developed for classroom use in the great books programs St. John’s College. The culmination of this Aristotelian Logic sequence is selections from the Posterior Analytics where Aristotle offers an account of the demonstrative reasoning of theoretical sciences. The interest of this Sourcebook, as of Aristotelian Logic, is search for such knowledge. This Aristotelian sequence is preceded by a sequence of readings in Medieval grammatica speculativa, or philosophy of language. This propaedeutic sequence begins with an ancient source to which that metaphysically minded ‘grammar’ recurred, namely Augustine’s De magistro, or On the Teacher. It is a dialogue between Augustine and his son about the triadic relation of the spoken word to the word thought and the thing thought about. This aporetic dialectic between Augustine and his son proves effective in awakening students to the theoretical stakes of Logic. Similarly, from later theological inquiries into language for purposes of scriptural interpretation more general theories of language emerged. The theoretical uses thus made of Aristotelian Logic by the Jewish theologian Maimonides and the Catholic Thomas Aquinas whet student appetite for the technical matter of the Organon sequence to follow.

The highly engaging introduction to thinking like an economist, updated for a new generation of readers.

When economists wrestle with any social issue—be it unemployment, inflation, healthcare, or crime and punishment—they do so impersonally. The big question for them is: what are the costs and benefits, or trade-offs, of the solutions to such matters? These trade-offs constitute the core of how economists see the world—and make the policies that govern it.

Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach of analyzing controversial policy issues. A useful introduction to the various factors that inform public opinion and policymaking, Trade-Offs is composed of case studies on topics drawn from across contemporary law and society.

Intellectually stimulating yet accessible and entertaining, Trade-Offs will be appreciated by students of economics, public policy, health administration, political science, and law, as well as by anyone following current social policy debates.